Sessions at Strange Loop 2011 about Actors

Monday 19th September 2011

The Actor model of concurrent computation is gaining in popularity. Designing actor-based systems requires thinking differently about how we decompose problems and construct solutions. We will explore the implementation of several patterns of actor interaction. These patterns can be applied in network-scale collaborative programs written in any language. They apply especially well to massively concurrent multi-core systems programmed in actor-friendly languages such as Erlang and Scala.

Tuesday 20th September 2011

Erlang and Scala have a very complementary set of strengths and weaknesses for building large scale distributed systems. Cliff will show how to integrate Erlang and Scala using scalang, a library that allows scala actors to transparently participate in Erlang/OTP based distributed systems.

We believe that one should never have to choose between productivity and scalability, which has been the case with traditional approaches to concurrency and distribution. The cause of that has been the wrong tools and the wrong layer of abstraction — and Akka is here to change that. Akka is using the Actors together with Software Transactional Memory (STM) to create a unified runtime and programming model for scaling both UP (utilizing multi-core processors) and OUT (utilizing the grid/cloud). With Akka 2.0 this will be taken to a whole new level.